Sunny Yu


2024

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CultureBank: An Online Community-Driven Knowledge Base Towards Culturally Aware Language Technologies
Weiyan Shi | Ryan Li | Yutong Zhang | Caleb Ziems | Sunny Yu | Raya Horesh | Rogério Paula | Diyi Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

To enhance language models’ cultural awareness, we design a generalizable pipeline to construct cultural knowledge bases from different online communities on a massive scale. With the pipeline, we construct CultureBank, a knowledge base built upon users’ self-narratives with 12K cultural descriptors sourced from TikTok and 11K from Reddit. Unlike previous cultural knowledge resources, CultureBank contains diverse views on cultural descriptors to allow flexible interpretation of cultural knowledge, and contextualized cultural scenarios to help grounded evaluation. With CultureBank, we evaluate different LLMs’ cultural awareness, and identify areas for improvement. We also fine-tune a language model on CultureBank: experiments show that it achieves better performances on two downstream cultural tasks in a zero-shot setting. Finally, we offer recommendations for future culturally aware language technologies. We release the CultureBank dataset, code and models at https://github.com/SALT-NLP/CultureBank. Our project page is at culturebank.github.io